I believe the basic premise is good. Yes, there are alternatives to college but unfortunately the article didn't cite any useful ones and didn't paint a good picture of a future without one. Same old irrelevant -world that never was- crock-and-bull spouted by grandmas, and modern american "capitalists" that just ain't so. "Hard work". "Be creative". "Do something you like ...and everything will work out fine. Just look at that billionaire over there!"

And not everything you learn in college is learned in class either. Just hanging out with other different kinds of people, like in the dorm, professors, people from other countries, etc. You pick up ideas, ways of living, it's a different way of thinking about life.

And not everything you learn in college is learned in class either. Just hanging out with other different kinds of people, like in the dorm, professors, people from other countries, etc. You pick up ideas, ways of living, it's a different way of thinking about life.

Art

You can do that in any other situation too. People, time, place, situation, stuff. It's just life. No need to pay a school for their brand of it.

I feel torn by this trend. I happened to have achieved success in my chosen field (computer programming) with only technical school training--no college degree. OTOH where would the next generation of doctors and engineers come from if everyone said no to college?

OTOH where would the next generation of doctors and engineers come from if everyone said no to college?

The genius here is Everyone won't do it. It's a big world. People have different desires, plans, expectation, agendas, and influences. That's good.

Everyone feeling forced to, by employer's filtering tactics and other marketplace subterfuge, or being made to feel they must do it, is bad. That is the situation that defines most college attendance today.

There will always be people who want it and can afford it. And there will always be disciplines that require it. When the student is ready, the Master will appear. A match made in heaven. Goody goody unto them!

The vast majority of people need not much more than a decent job to underwrite the rest of their lives wherein they can be happy. Paying for a Job skill + Shakespear is over paying. And that "well-rounded" education thing they keep bringing up? That's an Academe "rice bowl" issue. You can get all that by just reading more. Academics are like any other salesman. "buy my stuff. The whole world revolves around it".

"You can do that in any other situation too. People, time, place, situation, stuff. It's just life. No need to pay a school for their brand of it." - FCorelli

It's a different kind of people. Academic scholarly people. People who read books. People with PhD's, people working on Master's degrees.

I used to be a Meat Cutter with Winn Dixie in Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. Those were a rough bunch of people. Way different than the college professors I worked around during work study.

I don't want to be derogatory but the people I worked around in blue collar jobs were not concerned with higher thought. They were concerned about smoking, drinking, and going to bars and picking up horny divorced women.

I was not into drinking alcohol and did not hang out with the crowd in college that consumed alcohol. In fact my first roommate was a drunk and after my first quarter in college I very quickly got a new roommate.

I don't want to be derogatory but the people I worked around in blue collar jobs were not concerned with higher thought. They were concerned about smoking, drinking, and going to bars and picking up horny divorced women.

I know those peeps. I am from the world of proudly drunk, ignorant, lazy, angry people prone to violence. And those were just my parents

I have been running from those Blue Collar types my whole life with varying degrees of success. But I found just being smart and getting my ticket punched (getting degrees) didn't really get me into the club.

When I was 19 I went from a job that was almost exclusively low class/blue collar to one where I worked 1 on 1 with lots of happy peppy recent collage graduate types. They all assumed I was about 22 or 23 yrs old. I'm thinking "Do I look old..?" It was because they all thought I had a degree or at least had done a stretch in college. I modeled myself after Ward Cleaver and the guy in Father Knows Best on TV. They were what I thought actual adults should be like.

Then I had to run away from home and eat at the same time. Hard to associate with the genteeeeel class like that.

I was not into drinking alcohol and did not hang out with the crowd in college that consumed alcohol.

I have yet to find a "crowd" in america that is not into alcoholism except the AA crowd and uptight religious wackos.

<<I used to be a Meat Cutter with Winn Dixie in Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. Those were a rough bunch of people. Way different than the college professors I worked around during work study.

I don't want to be derogatory but the people I worked around in blue collar jobs were not concerned with higher thought. They were concerned about smoking, drinking, and going to bars and picking up horny divorced women. >>

I had relatively few associations with college student friends, mostly fellow dorks in the radio club and such who were studying to be engineers.

The associations with ordinary working people and blue collar types I encountered when working at my father's butcher shop were valuable experiences with salt of the earth types.

The same was true when I was working part time at a retail store during college.

No charge for those experiences, wither.

My experience in graduate school was with young people looking for a main chance in life. That tended to be good, if somewhat cut throat.

As to the PhD type intellectual wanna be -- that was mostly negative. They might be studying something, but they didn't know much about life. Lots of mostly worthless theories though. Sounds like Art was impressed by that. I was not.